Spelling Mystery

[PT]

The word "superintendent" is sometimes misspelled as "superintendant". In
my Word 2003, the misspelled version is not flagged by the spell checker. I
looked in my custom dictionary, to confirm that neither version is included.
So why no flagging?

 

[Herb Tyson [MVP]]

Word 2007, like Word 2003, also thinks that both are acceptable.

The easiest solution would be to create an AutoCorrect entry that
automatically changes "superintendant" to "superintendent" when it's typed.
Slightly more work would be to to create an exclude/exception dictionary,
and to put superintendant into it to force Word to flag it as wrong. I'd use
the former if they were my own mistakes, and the latter if I needed to
correct someone else's work (i.e., my own AutoCorrect entries don't force
someone else's Word to automatically get corrected).

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I can reproduce this. Given that Google considers it a mistake ("Did you
mean: superintendent?"), I think we can assume this is a bug (and it hasn't
been corrected in Word 2007, either).

 

[Robert]

The word "superintendent" is sometimes misspelled as "superintendant". In
my Word 2003, the misspelled version is not flagged by the spell checker. I
looked in my custom dictionary, to confirm that neither version is included.
So why no flagging?

The OED gives "superintendant" as an obsolete spelling formerly used when
"superintendant" was considered a foreign loan word from French
("superintendant" is the still current French spelling).